


some days bring us to our knees

by wolfwalkerspirit



Category: Infinity Train (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Hurt/Comfort, Simon gets his redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29232849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfwalkerspirit/pseuds/wolfwalkerspirit
Summary: ““Why did you...”Everything feels upside down. There’s a moment, after the words crawl up his throat, unfiltered, that the world flips and everything looks different. Feels different. Any relief he should have felt at being saved turns to bindings in his chest, constricting too tight. The air tastes sour. The hard metal biting at his spine, his skull, feels good because it’s real and he’s still alive to feel it at all. He breathes and it hurts—in his throat, at the knot he can’t seem to swallow.“I— I don’t know,” Grace answers, sounding just as breathless and confused as he feels.”OrAt the last moment, Simon makes a better choice.
Relationships: Simon Laurent & Grace Monroe, Simon Laurent/Grace Monroe
Comments: 8
Kudos: 51





	some days bring us to our knees

“Why did you...”

Everything feels upside down. There’s a moment, after the words crawl up his throat, unfiltered, that the world flips and everything looks different. Feels different. Any relief he should have felt at being saved turns to bindings in his chest, constricting too tight. The air tastes sour. The hard metal biting at his spine, his skull, feels good because it’s real and he’s still alive to feel it at all. He breathes and it hurts—in his throat, at the knot he can’t seem to swallow. 

“I— I don’t know,” Grace answers, sounding just as breathless and confused as he feels. 

It doesn’t help. Knowing. Knowing that she didn’t have a reason, didn’t think it through. It doesn’t help and it’s not what he wanted to hear and his hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t stop it. Smoothing them across his pants doesn’t help so he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until spots of color bloom across his vision, twisting his fingers in his hair. His heart’s still pounding and that won’t stop either. 

Simon’s never felt so out of control.

It’s easy to paint miniatures to be exactly the way he likes. It’s easy to write worlds into existence and design the lives of characters that all bend to his will, that don’t exist outside his realm of influence. Control is comfortable, it’s _easy_. So what is he supposed to when his head, heart, and body all stop listening to him, at war with each other? 

It’s scary and he doesn’t know what to do. How to make things better. 

Something dark and ugly and high on adrenaline rises in him, and he laughs. It’s a desperate thing, rasping in his throat, catching in his chest, stealing the air from his lungs and aching in the pit of his stomach. He laughs, and it sounds hysterical, unrecognizable even in his own ears. There’s no humor in the sound; it’s only a release. 

He realizes he can see the chilling glow of his number risen up to his throat, and still he laughs until he can’t breathe, can’t hear, can’t think. 

Only, there comes a point when he stops laughing, when tears sting in his eyes and run down his cheeks. Sobs tear up his throat from somewhere deep. The weight of reality settles in to crush him. It’s the weight of what he almost did, what he tried to do. Aching, he turns off his back to his side and curls. The world’s a little easier too digest blocked behind a curtain of hair and the dig of his knees into his chest helps with... something. 

His throat clogs and his nose does too. Struggling to beat under the twisting strain of _everything_ , his heart stutters and stumbles over itself. It’s the guilt, the pain, the fear that chains him down and holds tight. He doesn’t want to hurt Grace anymore. He doesn’t want Grace or Samantha or anyone else to hurt him anymore. And he doesn’t want to be left behind, left in the dark ever again. Discarded and forgotten. The anger’s snuffed out, the flame dead and the last wisps of smoke fading. There’s no more desire for revenge, to hurt the people who hurt him. It still pains him, the collection of scars still raw on his heart, but something in him is so tired, so bone weary from etching more scars in himself by trying to settle the score. 

Maybe it’s time to admit he isn’t always right, because none of this feels right now. His eyes burn and his cheeks are wet and salty and his stomach’s turning with the heaving breaths and sobs pulling up from it. That’s not right, not how he wants to feel. 

It’s only after he quiets some, the storm wearing itself down, that the warmth of a hand rests against his shoulder. Admitting how much of a relief it is, how much his mind and body settles under her touch, feels like defeat. But all the same, it taste sweet and familiar in his mouth. Fresh tears spill in earnest. 

“Hey, come here,” Grace says, and though her voice is gentle, there’s force behind the way her fingers curl around the strap of his tank top and pull. 

Exhausted and a little shaky, he yields and lets her pull him into some semblance of a hug. In the end, they settle with his head tucked beneath her chin, her arms looped around the small of his back to hold him close, hold him steady. Quickly, her skin dampens beneath his cheek.

It’s hard not to feel like a child, being held like this after breaking down, crying harder than he remembers having cried in a very, very long time. That notion stings, but he lets it stay, carves out space for it. And for a long time, neither of them moves. Slowly, Simon starts to feel a little more like himself. His nose stops running and the uneasy hitches and hiccups fade from his breaths. Even if guilt and pain still share the privilege of taking bites out of his heart, it’s better. 

“I’m so sorry.” It’s the first thing he mumbles against Grace’s chest, and he knows it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough, but he has to start, he has to try. If there’s any hope in salvaging what they used to have together, he has to take the chance because he doesn’t know what else he even could do. Life on the train without Grace isn’t even a consideration, even a possibility. It’s been years, and they’ve shared their best and their very, absolute worst with each other. And he’s tired of exposing all the cracked, ugly, angry pieces of himself to her, just to drag someone else down into the darkness with him. It doesn’t make him feel any better. It only makes everything worse. 

“Simon...” Grace says, slow, and there’s something distinctly sad in her voice. He doesn’t know what to make of it, but clings to the word with a cocktail of hope and dread mixing in his stomach. She stays quiet after that, and he can feel her apprehension in the stillness. 

“I shouldn’t have—“ he starts, stopping abruptly when the the air catches in his chest. His throat aches, feels raw and swollen from crying, and the words rasp and cut on their way up. Swallowing gravel or broken glass would be more pleasant than spitting up the sticky words that just want to stay buried. “I tried to kill you,” he says, still in disbelief. The awe and horror bubbling in his chest leech into the words. It still all feels so far away, what he did, yet so viscerally raw and real all the same. 

The air that blows by is warm and laced with dust and sand. 

“What am I even supposed to say to that?” Grace answers back, and Simon doesn’t know. So he doesn’t answer, not really. 

There are still tears running silently down his cheeks, and when he leans back, not entirely out of Grace’s embrace, but just enough so that he can look her in the eye, he wipes at his own with the back of his wrist. It feels a little pointless to do anything about it, but still he tries. “I’ve been a monster,” he says, the realization hitting him with just as much rattling, crushing force as the train’s wheels. All swept up in a whirlwind of hurt and purpose, it was so easy to stay blind. But now, he can see the wreckage laid out behind him, the lives he crushed beneath his feet. “Grace, I’m sorry,” he says again, because nothing else will get across how he feels. Even those words feel like pebbles tossed into a quarry, too small to make a difference. 

For a moment, she just sighs, and regards him with so many conflicting emotions swirling in her eyes he can’t begin to pick them apart. But then she brushes back the stray strands of hair matted to his damp cheeks, and when she’s finished, her hands fall to his shoulders. Fingers curling in hard, she keeps a steady grip. “What you did wasn’t okay,” she says, though they both know it. He knows it now, anyway. He thinks he’s always known it, somewhere in the deepest depths of his heart. It was just easier to push it down, then, to ignore it and act on perceived justice and righteousness instead. “Nothing that you’ve done in the last couple of days has been okay.” Her eyes wander for a moment, at that. Down to the wheels thundering below them. Up to the strange, unearthly sky. 

He swallows, waits, and feels the heat of shame creeping up the back of his neck. Time passes and the world spins; Simon feels dizzy with it, with the anticipation too. 

“But, you’re not the only one who’s been doing things they shouldn’t,” she says, every beat weighty. Her gaze draws to the shrinking number on her arm, still wrapped up higher than it ever should have been, before she meets his eyes again. “I think we both have a second chance now, if you’re willing to take yours.”

It sounds like an invitation, and Simon wants to cry all over again for how much of a relief that is. There’s no ‘stay out of my life’ or ‘I should never have saved you’. Because she’s better than him. Because, hopefully, she can still believe there’s a little good in him after all he’s done. He wants to believe it too. Or at the very least, he can believe in the good in _her_ , follow her light and try to become someone deserving of standing next to her. 

Blinking back the mist welling in his eyes, he nods, not quite trusting his words will come out right. They have a tendency to warp and bend, somewhere between his mind and his mouth. 

“But you have to promise me you’ll be better. You have to make good choices and be a good person, Simon, no matter what happens. No matter who hurts you.”

_You did._

The thought echoes up from somewhere deep and dark. He can’t push it back; it’s there and true and his heart still aches with the proof. She was the one person he thought was always on his side, the one he could always confide in, always depend on. He went to her when he lost the last of his baby teeth, way back in the beginning, with blood in his mouth and pride in his chest. He cried with her when he got homesick. They laughed together over growing pains and stuck it out over their awkward years. Leaning on each other, they’d taken every step of their twisting journey through their lives on the train. Through broken bones and lonely nights, through campfire stories and candy binges, even through the serious talks with exposed hearts and red rimmed eyes, they were always together. And her lies, her betrayal, hurt like nothing he could have ever imagined. Even now, he can feel the sting, the empty space where years of trust have been carved away with the cruel twist of a knife in his back. 

“I just want things to be like they used to,” he says. Back before they started the Apex, even. When it was just the two of them, when they looked out for each other and didn’t keep secrets or get into fights any more serious than an argument over who got to read a comic they stumbled across first. 

“We can’t be like that anymore,” she replies. Everything in him hopes she only means that they can’t have the same outlook, can’t make games of raising their numbers or daydream about who the conductor might be. “We have to go home.” Reaching out, she touches his neck when she says it, traces the string of glowing numbers all the way to the very last digit. 

There’s so much to unravel in that sentiment. But the first thing that strikes Simon is that she’ll be gone long before him. If they really need to get their numbers down to go home, she’ll get there first. She’ll leave him here. Just like with Samantha, all those years ago, she’ll go where he can’t follow and leave him behind to pick up the pieces. That thought terrifies him, sets his heart pounding against his ribs, but he swallows it down for now. She’s still here, and extending him far more kindness than he deserves. 

So, he’ll take it one day at a time. One step at a time. He’ll follow Grace until he can’t anymore, then he’ll find his own path, because it’s what he has to do. 

“Wait for me when you get there?” he asks, hesitant, shy, hoping. 

“However long it takes.” She smiles, and it’s soft, a little sad around the edges, but there nonetheless. “I want to see you on the other side of all this. Deal?” she asks and holds out a hand in offering. 

Simon takes it.

“Deal.”


End file.
